Of De Witt Williams On His Way To Lincoln Cemetery - Analysis

A funeral ride that refuses to be small

The poem’s central move is to take a life the world might dismiss as nothing but and insist, through the very route of the hearse, that De Witt Williams had a full geography of pleasure, habit, and love. The repeated label Plain black boy sounds at first like plain description, but it quickly reads as an accusation: this is the kind of phrase society uses to shrink someone even after death. Brooks counters that shrinking by naming what he knew—streets, corners, halls, and joys—so the poem becomes both elegy and correction.

Swing low: the hymn as comfort and critique

The refrain Swing low swing low borrows the spiritual’s promise of a chariot that carries the soul home, but Brooks lets it do double duty. It is soothing, even ceremonial, yet it is also made to rub against the bluntness of Nothing but. The tone feels mournful with a hard edge: the hymn tries to lift him, while the social language pins him down. That tension—between uplift and reduction—runs through every return of the refrain.

Seeing the city, blind within his casket

The poem’s most haunting contradiction is in the line Blind within his casket followed by maybe he will know. He cannot literally see the Pool Hall or the Show as he passes, yet the speaker imagines recognition happening anyway, as if memory is stronger than the body’s limits. The command Drive him past turns the procession into a last tour: the dead man is denied sight, but not denied belonging. Even in death, the city is called on to admit that he was here.

Forty-seventh Street and the right to have favorites

Brooks anchors De Witt’s life in specific Chicago coordinates: Down through Forty-seventh Street, Underneath the L, the Northwest Corner at Prairie that he loved so well. These aren’t grand monuments; they are chosen places, the kind a person returns to because they feel right. The detail matters because it pushes back against the idea that a plain life is an empty one. Having a favorite corner is a form of identity, a quiet claim of taste and attachment in a city that often treats Black men as interchangeable.

Liquid joy and the poem’s refusal to sanitize him

The speaker insists, Don’t forget the Dance Halls—the Warwick and Savoy—where De Witt picked his women and drank his liquid joy. The tone here turns slightly defiant: this is not a cleaned-up memorial that makes the dead respectable by erasing desire and drinking. Brooks lets him keep his pleasures, even the messy ones, as part of what made him real. That choice is another way the poem resists the flattening of Nothing but: a reduced person is easy to manage; a person with appetites and stories is not.

The bitter loop of Born and Bred

The poem begins and ends with the same facts—born in Alabama, bred in Illinois—as if the life is being filed into a simple record. But after the tour of his streets and pleasures, the repetition sounds less like summary and more like indictment: after all that, the world will still say Nothing but a plain black boy. The closing refrain leaves us inside that conflict. The chariot swings low, the city rolls by, and the poem asks us to notice what is being carried—not just a body to Lincoln Cemetery, but a whole life that language keeps trying to make smaller.

One sharp pressure the poem applies: if a man can be so specifically placed—Pool Hall, Show, Forty-seventh Street, Warwick and Savoy—what does it say about the speakers (and the society behind them) that they still reach for Nothing but as their final sentence? The poem doesn’t let that phrase rest as harmless; it makes it sound like the last violence done to him.